I've cut my nails and I am having a good time on guitar. Made some new stuff, but just a matter of making more time and letting some ideas flow. I can completely understand how people can only write new songs and conceive ideas after jamming. Sometimes just playing random stuff leads to better things. You just gotta keep playing. It's the only way you can flesh out new ideas, and it's the only way you can improve your playing skills (and your ear training).
I've seen a disturbing rise in the luxury travel market. Ridiculous travel packages (and related prices) are appearing out of nowhere on cruises and on private jet travels and hotel resorts and what not. This stuff doesn't appear unless there's a market for it. Who is paying 6 figures for a 3 month holiday? And who can take that much time off work? I guess some people have inherited wealth, which disgusts me. There is no drive to succeed, only to flaunt wealth and not contribute to society. But I've already written on those things before so I won't cover it again. What bothers me is that in most western nations, we are living in tough times, with a lack of jobs, high tax rates, poor infrastructure and generally poor governance. We are getting budget decisions which hit us hard, so that things like long term travel are just pipe dreams for most people. This gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger, and we are letting it happen. Something has to change. But I suppose attitudes like mine help fuel the problem. Idiots who just use a hashtag and expect that things will just magically change.
I love how content control has gradually gone away. Previously we had media controlled by a few people. I remember the days when we just watched free to air television - 5-7 channels. Now things have gone digital, and there's cable tv, internet or satellite tv, podcasts and youtube. We control what we watch now. That's good news, and I'm shocked that anything can have good ratings now that people have such a free reign of choice. Ditto for music and what not. I guess this is why movie revenues fall, and so do music sales.
So the NSA scared everyone! Everyone thought it was the FBI and CIA who were up to no good (well they were), but all along it was the NSA who were conducting the worst acts of treason (when stacked up against the principles of the constitution), behind the scenes! I was reading that it's employing large amounts of software to monitor data to help its photo and picture recognition technologies. Essentially, if you have a picture on social media that identifies you, if you go to a public place, the NSA will be able to identify you. That doesn't do wonders for much in terms of privacy. But here's the thing. They obviously don't have the resources to verify the information it's receiving via humans (a human can tell you if something matches a picture), but software struggles to do that, because abstract concepts confuse it. You can mess with the system, because there's no element for data integrity. Keep feeding it data, all data that's wrong! It will mess the system up. Take a photo of a tree stump and call it your name, or tag it as a friend. This data is junk or will mess up the algorithm. Give it a try, but it has to happen on a mass scale.
Until next time, it's been a good return.
Joaquin out.
